Quick CRM Data Overview
The fundamental goal of any CRM is to keep track of all your customer ‘touches’. And then apply that information to help you sell more effectively to your new and existing clients, as well as to support them better by having a closer and more informed relationship.
Typically customer touches refer to all your interactions with them: Calls, Meetings, Emails, Sales Opportunities, Service Cases and even Web Chats. Add to these touches your various Tasks related to your clients, and any Notes or Documents you might make regarding them, and you have most of the data you find in a typical CRM.
Business to Business (B2B) CRMs are the most common, and they keep track of customer Accounts and all the Contacts related to those Accounts. The customer touch information above, plus Tasks, Notes and Documents, all get linked to customer Accounts – and to the Contacts at your Accounts.
And that’s about it – that describes what information you’ll find in a normal CRM. Note that in B2B CRMs all the data is very Account-centric. Starting from any Account, you can find all the CRM information related to that Account. It’s easy to picture a circular hub-and-spokes diagram, with the Account at the hub, and everything else linked to the hub.
Quick Order Management System (OMS) Data Overview
As described in this article an Order Management System typically contains a Product Catalog, which contains the items you sell. Those items may be added to a sales Quotation, and as the sales process progresses, the Quote may be converted first to a Sales Order, and then to one or more Invoices. The goods on the Invoice are Shipped to the customer. In time, Payments are received and allocated to the Invoice, or perhaps a Credit Note is issued against some or all of the value of the Invoice.
These are the usual types of information that are contained in an Order Management System – at least for the Sales side of things, Equivalent information is also stored for the Purchase side as well.
In each case, every single one of the above items of data (Quote, Sales Order, Invoice, Shipping record, Payment and Credit Note) is related to your customer – and if you are typically selling to businesses, those customers are the same Accounts found in your B2B CRM.
Why Not Combine Two Account-Centric Systems?
As we see in the two sections above, both the CRM and the OMS contain data which is fully Account-centric. This makes it remarkably straightforward to combine the two sets of information, so that all that Sales (and Purchase) transactional data in the OMS can be seen within the CRM. And now each Account has all the CRM types of information linked to it, as well as all the OMS types of information.
As long as you have a good access control mechanism to make sure employees only see the types of information you want them to see, this combination of the two kinds of data creates a system which can inform your employees much faster and more fully than the two separate systems ever could.
OK - Seems Like a Good Idea - How Do We Do It?
The first thing you need to consider when you want to combine a CRM and an OMS is that in order for the CRM to show information like Quotes, Invoices, Sales Orders, Product Catalog etc … it needs to be a CRM that actually can contain data like that. This means you’ll need an All in One CRM, as explained in this article.
Once you have an All in One CRM system, it will show you all the CRM type information, as well as all the OMS type data, all linked to each of your Accounts. Your staff can directly create all sales and purchase transactions within the CRM – Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, Purchase Orders etc ..
If you have an eCommerce store, your All in One CRM can typically directly link with that online store to receive new information about online sales, payments and customers – so that all transactions are shown in the one place inside the CRM.
And then all these business transactions can be synchronized with your accounting system, often using a connector system such as Integromat or Zapier.
In this way your accounting staff can see all sales and purchase transactions posted from the CRM, and perform their general ledger postings and financial reporting in the accounting system. All the transactional data comes from the CRM and customer invoices may be seen in the CRM – so you minimize the number of staff with access to the accounting system, increasing security and reducing costs.
If you agree this sounds like a great way to run your business, just give us a call or drop us an email at info@1crm.com.
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